Search This Blog

These posts come from visits to reservations and urban-Indian communities. Look for my book, "American Apartheid: The Native American Struggle for Self-Determination and Inclusion," coming In spring 2018.

The Adoption Era, defined: Native Americans expose a forgotten period in their history

A version of this article appeared in Indian Country Today in November 2011. It was funded in part by the George Polk Program for Investigative Reporting. It appears in the anthology Two Worlds: Lost Children of the Indian Adoption Projects, edited by Trace A. DeMeyer and Patricia Cotter-Busbee.

“I’man angry Indian,” Roger St. John, Sisseton Wahpeton Oyate, told the First
Nations Repatriation Institute’s second annual adult adoptees’ summit. The elite
panel included child-welfare specialists, judges, lawyers, community activists
and scholars. The most important experts, according to the organization’s
founder/director, Sandra White Hawk, Rosebud Sioux Tribe, were adult adoptees—such
as St. John, shown below—who related their experiences at the three-day meeting at the
University of Minnesota, in St. Paul.

“I’m more than glad to tell you I’m pissed off,”
continued St. John, a 49-year-old truck driver with dark hair pulled back in a
ponytail. “I was the youngest of sixteen children, grabbed at age four, along
with three older brothers—no paperwork, nothing. The other kids in the family
escaped because they took off.” Soon, St. John and his siblings ended up in New
York City at Thanksgiving time. The year was 1966: “We were on the front page
of the newspaper, along with lots of good talk about the holiday and adoption.
We were brought up without our culture, which took a terrible toll on our
lives. I grew up angry and miserable.”

St. John’s experience was replicated all over Indian
country in the mid-to-late 20th century. The boarding-school era
that had begun in the late 1800s was winding down and the abusive residential schools
set up to isolate and assimilate Native children were being closed down or turned
over to the tribes, a process that was largely completed by the 1970s.
Meanwhile, another means of separating Native children from their communities
was gathering steam.

The Indian Adoption Project was a federal program
that acquired Indian children from 1958 to 1967 with the help of the
prestigious Child Welfare League of America; a successor organization, the
Adoption Resource Exchange of North America, functioned from 1966 until the
early 1970s. Churches were also involved. In the Southwest, the Church of
Latter Day Saints took thousands of Navajo children to live in Mormon homes and
work on Mormon farms, and the Catholic Church and other Christian denominations
swept many more Indian youngsters into residential institutions they ran
nationwide, from which some children were then fostered or adopted out. As many
as one-third of Indian children were separated from their families between 1941
and 1967, according to a 1976 report by the Association on American Indian
Affairs.

“People have heard of the boarding school era and
know it was bad, but they don’t know our adoption era even exists,” said White
Hawk, shown right, who was taken from her family on the Rosebud reservation as a toddler in
the mid-1950s. “A few small studies of adult adoptees have been done, and we’re
just learning how to talk about what happened. We need think tanks and
conferences and scientific research to explore what occurred and how it
affected us.”

Then, White Hawk said, that information can inform
current Indian child-welfare cases. “When experts take the stand to testify in
a child-welfare hearing [about placement of a child or termination of parental
rights, for example], they need academic backup to explain the relationship
between, let’s say, suicide and being disconnected from your culture,” she
explained. “The courts want Ph.D.-level research to back up what we tell them.”

A paper by Carol Locust, Ph.D., Cherokee, describes Native
adoptees suffering from what she calls split-feather syndrome—the damage caused
by loss of tribal identity and growing up “different” in an inhospitable world.
“Lost Bird” is another term researchers have used to refer to the group,
recalling one of the earliest Indian adoptees. A Lakota infant who survived the
1890 massacre at Wounded Knee sheltered by the frozen corpse of her mother, she was claimed
as a war trophy by a general who named her Lost Bird, according to her biographer,
Renee Sansome Flood in Lost Bird of
Wounded Knee.

Thanks to copious newspaper coverage of the massacre
and its aftermath, Lost Bird became her generation’s celebrity adoptee. However, fame did not save her from a fate that was a harbinger for too many Native children.
She endured intolerance and isolation, and when she rebelled as a teenager, was
shipped back to her birth family, where she no longer fit in. After a stint in
Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show and the loss of three children—two died and she
gave away the third, according to Flood—Lost Bird was felled by influenza in
1920, at age 30. “Throughout her life of prejudice, exploitation, poverty,
misunderstanding, and disease, she never gave up hope that one day she would
find out where she really belonged,” Flood wrote.

At the two summits and other events White Hawk has
organized or spoken at since 2003, modern-day adoptees have recounted their dramatic
life journeys, sometimes for the first time. “The stories vary from the most
abusive to the most beautiful, but that’s not the point,” she said. “Even in
loving families, Native adoptees live without a sense of who they are. Love
doesn’t provide identity.”

“I never felt sorry for myself,” said St. John, “but
if I ever got hurt, it wounded me to my soul because I felt no one was there
for me.” In recent years, he has found his birth mother and connected emotionally
with his adoptive parents. “They were so young, in their twenties, when a
priest convinced them to adopt four Sioux boys from South Dakota. It was too
much—for all of us.”

During the adoption era almost any issue—from minor
to serious—could precipitate the loss of an Indian child. Among Native people on multiple reservations interviewed prior to the summit, two said they were separated from their families after hospital stays
as young children, one for a rash, the other for tuberculosis. A third was
seized at his babysitter’s home; when his mother tried to rescue him, she was jailed,
he said. A fourth recalled that he was taken after his father died, though his
mother did not want to give him up. A fifth described being snatched, along
with siblings, because his grandfather was a medicine man who wouldn’t give up
his traditional ways. As in St. John’s case, no home studies or comparable
investigations appear to have been done to support the removals. “Indians had
no way to stop white people from taking their kids,” said yet another
interviewee. “We had no rights.”

Eighty-five percent of the Native children removed from
their families from 1941 to 1967 were placed in non-Indian homes or
institutions, said the Association on American Indian Affairs report. The aim, according to White Hawk, was assimilation and extinction of the tribes as entities, as their
younger generations were removed, year after year—just as it had been with the
boarding schools.

“We can’t be afraid to use words like genocide,” said summit participant Anita
Fineday, J.D., White Earth Band of Ojibwe,
managing director of Casey Family
Programs’ Indian child-welfare programsand a former chief judge at White Earth
Tribal Nation. “The end game, the official federal policy, was that the tribes
wouldn’t exist.”

As Native adoptees struggle to recover their
identities, some have trouble accessing their original birth certificates. Many
states seal adoption records to protect the confidentiality of the process. “In
a state that does this, you have to be a detective to find out where you’re
from,” said White Hawk.

Or lucky. According to Sharon Whiterabbit, Ho-Chunk
Nation, a business consultant and internationally known
rights advocate, the son she’d given up
as a teen mother found her because he lost his social security number. To get a
new one, he had to petition the courts for his original birth certificate and,
using the information he found there, tracked her down.

Could something be done on a tribal level to keep
adoption records open and available for those who want them?, Whiterabbit asked
the group. This summit was about solutions, as well as problems, and Fineday had
an answer: “Tribes have a right to know their members, so we can demand the
records. We’re not requesting, though. We’re demanding. At White Earth, we were
successful with this tack in a couple of cases. When the [adoption] documents
arrived, I got goosebumps.” Carrie Imus, director of social services and former
chairperson of the Hualapai Tribal Nation, suggested that tribes pre-enroll children who are being adopted out, to ease their return.

According to Terry Cross, M.S.W., Seneca Nation of
Indians and founder/director of the National Indian Child Welfare Association, nontribal
child-welfare workers usually did not recognize the large support network that
Native children enjoy. “In the 1950s, ’60s and ’70s, children were removed from
Indian families because auntie was taking care of them, and the system called
that neglect,” said Cross, shown left during his lecture at the summit. “But it was simply a different cultural way of meeting the child’s
needs. To this day, social workers who remove Native children don’t know what
an Indian family is and what supports are available throughout the extended family and
tribe.”

Decades of stolen children caused unresolved personal
and community-wide grief and high rates of alcoholism, suicide and other social
ills that stalk individuals and even tribes to this day. “It took me years to
realize nothing was wrong with me and the response I had to the trauma I’d
experienced as an adoptee,” said Sandra Davidson, White
Earth Band of Ojibwe and a program manager for Praxis International, a
nonprofit dedicated to eliminating violence toward women and children.

Often referred to as “historical trauma,” the pain
can’t be cured with quick-fix programs, said Cross. “In Canada, we looked at
places where suicide is the highest, and it’s where the culture is most broken
down,” he said. “In such cases, do you start suicide-prevention programs, or do
you restore balance in the community through more self-governance? I have found
that unless you change a community systemically, you can’t affect the symptoms
of imbalance, such as suicide.”

Linear thinking—see a problem, apply a solution—is
ineffective, he added. “Mainstream society’s services are so fractured. Medical
doctors get the body, psychologists get the mind, judges get the social
context, and clergy get the spirit. But, in fact, we are all whole people, and
real solutions have to address that.”

Cross pointed to the sweat lodge as a way of caring
for the whole person. “It’s done in groups and includes teachers, stories and
protocols for how to conduct oneself, which relate to the social context,” he
said. “You sweat, and you experience aromatic herbs, which heal the body; you
participate in prayers and songs, which are in the realm of spirit; and when
you come out, you feel better and have moments of clarity that are aspects of
mind.”

That type of healing is required for entire
communities, as well as for individuals, and is a part of what Cross called the
“remembering” of indigenous cultures. Colonization has pulled indigenous
cultures apart worldwide, as colonizers have taken land and resources. “They also
usurp sovereignty and attack spirituality,” he said. “The last item is removal
of children to educate them in the language and worldview of the colonizer.
Now, though, we Native people are remembering our traditions and re-membering
our communities. We’re healing from within.”

The
adoptees’ stories must be articulated so they can heal, so their communities
can be restored, and so the experiences can be help remedy Indian country’s
ongoing child-welfare crisis, said White Hawk. The percentage of Native
children cared for outside the home remains disproportionately high across the
nation, despite the Indian Child Welfare Act, a 1978 law that sought to ameliorate
the situation—but has yet to do so. In Alaska, Native children make up 20
percent of the child population but 51 percent of the children in foster care;
in South Dakota, Indian kids are 15 percent of the state’s youngsters, but 53
percent of those in foster case. Other states topping the list for skewed
numbers include Minnesota, where the overrepresentation of Native kids in
foster care increased substantially from 2004 to 2009; Montana; Nebraska; and North
Dakota.

Another summit attendee, Gina Jackson, M.S.W., Te-Moak
Western Shoshone Tribe, is educating
judges through a model-court program of the National Council of Juvenile and
Family Court Judges, in Nevada. The program helps jurists understand ICWA
requirements and other best practices. “We’ve signed up 66 jurisdictions and
will help them work for compliance,” she said.

Education
of the judiciary is crucial, said Arizona state judge Kathleen Quigley, J.D.: “ICWA
cases are not the bulk of a judge’s work, so many are not familiar with the law.”
And the concept of the “active efforts” needed under ICWA to find and notify a
child’s tribe of a possible removal from the family is not dealt with
sufficiently in case law, she said.

“At this meeting, it’s been critical for me to hear from
folks who’ve been in the system and to understand how being taken from their
families and communities affected their lives,” Jackson said. “I want everyone
who works with kids and families to hear these voices.” Michael Petoskey, J.D.,
Grand Traverse Band of Ottawa and Chippewa Indians and chief judge of the
Pokagon Band of Potawatomi Indians, agreed. “Thank you for sharing your
stories,” he told the survivors of the adoption era. “We judges may underestimate
the impact on people’s lives when we terminate parental rights.”

“Your saying that is medicine for those of us who’ve
been through this,” White Hawk responded. Going forward, the group will work to
affect policy and will organize a day of prayer and healing for Friday,
November 2, 2012. “We’re hoping to have
events at state capitols nationwide,” said George McCauley, Omaha, head of the
First Nations Repatriation Institute’s board of directors.

Jerry Dearly, shown near right, the renowned Oglala Lakota storyteller
and educator who serves as White Hawk’s advisor, informed the group that healing
is about identity, understood on a profound level. “You have to find out who
you really are, who you really were,” he said. “Go to a quiet place where it’s
just you and the Creator. All of us are beautiful, but you have to believe in
yourself.”

“Now I have cancer and am waiting for an operation,” St.
John told the summit. “But I believe in myself, and I can survive anything.”

Popular Posts

This article appeared on In These Times' magazine's Rural America website in September 2015 and was updated in November.
This isn’t the “new” world for the Western Shoshone. And their West was never “wild.” It is a place of deep cultural connections to a homeland that at one time extended across portions of Idaho, Nevada, Utah and California. For more than 10,000 years, they have met to gather a type of white flint and to practice their ceremonies in what is today called the Tosawihi Quarries, or alternately the Tosawihi Complex, a stretch of northern Nevada.

“That stone is very sacred to us,” says Joe Holley, seen below in Tosawihi. He is a tribal council member and former chairman of the Battle Mountain Band of the Te-Moak Western Shoshone, one of several federally recognized tribes with links to the area. “We use it every day and have done so for millennia, for tools, ceremonies and healing. The stone, the water, the entire place is sacred.”
The word Tosawihi means White Kn…

This article first appeared on Indian Country Today Media Network in September 2016. Chairmen Bobby Sanchez and Vinton Hawley,
of the Walker River and Pyramid Lake Paiute tribes, respectively, are
plaintiffs in a major new voting-rights lawsuit, filed in federal court
in Nevada. They are joined by three military veterans from their communities:
Ralph Burns, Robert James and Johnny Williams, Jr. “We know that these veterans have already paid for the
equality we seek for all our people,” the two chairmen announced in a joint
public statement. The lawsuit follows the rejection of tribal requests to
Nevada’s chief elections official, Secretary of State Barbara Cegavske and two
counties for full access to national elections, including reservation satellite
offices for registration and early and Election Day voting. According to the
plaintiffs, Walker River
Paiute Tribe voters must currently travel 70-some miles round trip to register
and early vote in the Mineral County seat, while Pyramid L…

This story first appeared on Indian Country Today Media Network in May 2015. For an August 2015 update, go here.

A federal judge has shredded claim after claim by a South Dakota county that overlaps the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation but will not guarantee tribal members on-reservation voter registration and in-person absentee voting (sometimes dubbed “early voting”). In future, Jackson County wants all residents to continue traveling to the courthouse in the county seat, Kadoka, to access the full range of voting services. Tribal members, including Oglala Sioux Nation vice president and lead plaintiff Tom Poor Bear, sued. They say the county’s stance violates the Voting Rights Act and the Fourteenth Amendment, guaranteeing equal rights. The county defendants came back with a motion that the suit, Poor Bear v. The County of Jackson,be dismissed. Judge Karen Schreier turned the county down, repeatedly opining that the plaintiffs had offered sufficient grounds to move the suit forward, whil…

I am a long-time writer on human rights and culture, with a focus on Native American issues. Recognition for my articles includes the Richard LaCourse Award for Investigative Reporting from the Native American Journalists Association, of which I am an associate (non-Native) member, and numerous other grants and awards from major journalism organizations. I am a contributing writer for publications covering politics and the arts. During two decades in magazines, I was an editor at national consumer magazines.